Who are the people in the neighborhood?

I got an email last week from one of my client pals saying, “Hey Mama G – wouldn’t it be cool if ROI could make something whereby we could enter in a zip code and find all the donors within a certain radius?” The thinking was if they were doing an event or planning a trip, they could locate all the people nearby and invite them.

In nerd-language, this is called “Geo-Coding” and it deals with longitude and latitude coordinates (which we happen to store in your database for every record) and a thing called “higher-mathematics” …and something called the Haversine Formula. You know the one that goes like this:

That helps you to answer this question:

Finally a use for algebra! …and well anyway, it’s so much better than having to know all the zip codes or that CBSA-data stuff, isn’t it?
So we got our shiny cool glasses and a couple of chalk boards and got to work right away.

Now, in the MG Console you will find this handy little ditty:

This feature was brought to you by The Haversine Formula & Letter R.

In the meantime, if you are looking for a distraction watch this video

QTool queries….Set ‘em & forget ‘em

I know, try as you might, it’s hard to forget queries. But now, when you have a query that you like to run on a regular basis, you can use the new schedule function. This allows you to run a query on whatever interval you chose.
Just click the schedule icon:

Pick your desired schedule:

And sit back and relax. We’ll take care of the rest for you.

You will soon notice, that if your query uses any date selections, if you use the schedule option, we will prompt you to see if you want “relative” or “absolute” dates. This gives you the option of advancing your date criteria into the future with relative dates — or using the same fixed date each time you run the query.

Promotions

The promotion screens have some pretty nifty features that are worth highlighting. First of all, if you don’t know, the Promotional Screens are nothing more than groupings for your source codes which can be grouped by campaign, source type, contact type, and contact year — to help keep them organized. And what’s unique to Revolution Online is that rather than having a hard-coded display that you can’t change, we allow you the ability to customize this so you can change the view:

Like perhaps, let’s say you want to see it organized by Promotion:

…Or by Year (Calendar or Fiscal):

And within that, you can even select which years and columns you want to see:

The reason why this is nice is because then at whatever level you want to see, you can click on the branch in the tree-view navigation, select the summary or donation buttons to get a real-time view of your results.

Did You Know? >>MG Actions

Revolution Online gives you an easy way to manage your Major Gifts Projects & Actions. In addition to setting up Projects for groups of records through the Major Gifts Project Wizard (see Major Gifts Project Wizard) you can also mark Actions as completed through the MG Console. To do this, simply go into the Console, view your actions and use the handy little drop down wizard as shown below:

The Main Event – starring Revolution Online

Yep, that’s right. We’ve secretly been working behind the ’scenes’ to develop a new thing in Revolution Online. (We say “thing” when we don’t want to refer to modules because we don’t believe in “modules.”) Introducing ROI’s Events Management System — directly in your own Revolution Online database at no extra cost.

The Revolution Online Events Management System allows your organization the ability to track and manage events directly in your main database. Everything from events, venues, activities, participation, attendance, payments, and outputs such as name badges and tent cards are provided directly in this system. And with the events management system managed directly in your ROI Revolution Online database, the capabilities for reporting and in-depth analysis are limitless.

The system allows you to set up seating arrangements within your venue and the ability to clone an entire seating chart.

And then once you’re in a record, you can VIEW which events the person has participated in by clicking on the EVENTS Folder within their record.

There’s a lot to this Events Management System and this brief overview doesn’t do it full justice. To receive our White Paper on Events Management or to schedule an online demonstration and training, contact your ROI Client Service Manager.

Open APIs

Imagine someone coming into your organizational website and being able to do several things:

1. Updating their information — either by making changes to their existing record or adding new information.
2. Joining the organization in some way — by making a donation or taking action or simply expressing interest.
3. Viewing some information that you choose to expose to them, like their entire giving history.

Now imagine all that information coming directly into your ROI Revolution Online database. Scary huh? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Why? Because we give you FULL control over what ultimately gets written to any record in the ROI Revolution Online database. (Let’s face it — some of the web-based requests that come in off the street can be kind of sloppy and we’ve all taken great care to protect the integrity of your data).

Using ROI’s Open APIs we’re able to bring those requests directly into your database into their own PENDING WEB REQUEST section — where YOU can have control over what gets written to your database, either through automated and unattended scripts or manually via end user actions.

ROI officially introduced the Revolution Online Open API back in February of this year and in the past month, we’ve expanded its capabilities to include a “two-way” interaction with websites — meaning if you want, you can expose some relevant information back to the member or donor on the other end.

Revolution Online is PicLens Enabled

Um, this is so cool…

So our developers got a little side tracked one day and decided to enable “us” to use the popular browser add-on PicLens. Have you see this yet? It’s a really interesting way to view images. You can get it via the following URL and enable it to work in your browser. http://www.piclens.com/.

Anyway, as we were admiring its beauty, we got to thinkin’ – this should be in Revolution Online. So by 5PM that day it was! If you’ve added the add-on, click the button and watch what happens….

Did You Know?

When keying in an address record, if you key in the zipcode, we will populate the City and State for you automatically.

And – if you don’t know the zipcode, you can key in the City and State and click the “find” button. A window will display the likely zipcodes for that City and you can choose one.